“Make robots fight instead of people”: Mykhailo Fedorov launches Army of Robots — and you could be its CTO
Tech.eu Cate Lawrence
Ukraine’s Mykhailo Fedorov just launched an Army of Robots and wants a CTO to run it. The bet: robots, not soldiers, should take the dangerous jobs in war.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Cate Lawrence — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Mykhailo Fedorov used the IT Arena conference in Lviv to kick off a new push in Ukrainian defence tech: the Army of Robots. The former deputy prime minister, digital minister and defence minister said the initiative is looking for defencetech companies, engineers working on robotic systems, and a CTO or tech lead to help steer the project.
He pitched it as the next step after the Army of Drones, which began in 2022. That earlier effort, he said, helped prove how quickly warfare changes once unmanned systems get good enough. His evidence was blunt: drones now account for more than 95 per cent of strikes, and Ukraine already has more than 700 UAV manufacturers.
But Fedorov is already looking past drones. The new goal is robotisation — robots entering the places where people would otherwise be exposed first. In his framing, that means machines doing the dangerous work: evacuating wounded soldiers, carrying ammunition, laying and clearing mines, scouting, defending positions and striking targets. Sensors would spot threats before robotic systems move in.
The Army of Robots is meant to be more than a single project. Fedorov says the plan is to invest in defence companies, launch new technology projects, build R&D capacity, test systems with the military and then scale the ones that work. It also ties into a defence technology investment fund he announced in August, one that is supposed to back existing Ukrainian startups while also creating new companies around technologies the battlefield needs.
That fund’s early focus is battlefield robotics, jet-powered interceptor drones and low-cost AI-powered missiles. Palantir CEO Alex Karp was later named its first lead investor. Fedorov’s broader point is simple: Ukraine has to move faster than Russia can copy and scale military tech, and the way to do that is to pull engineers, battlefield experience, capital and technology into one loop.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right sort of ugly ambition. If a country is going to build military tech at speed, the least bad version is one that treats the battlefield like an R&D lab and tries to keep people out of the blast radius. The more interesting part is how openly Ukraine is trying to industrialize that loop instead of pretending defence innovation happens in a clean-room fantasy.
Read more about this at: Tech.eu
